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Preparing a Field Season

Our team is gearing up for their third field season on Salisbury Plain. We are working at creating groups of plant communities based on similar characteristics, in order to unpick their contributions to carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services. Our two sites consist of a species rich patch of farmland which we are removing species from selectively, and a patch of bare ground where we are planting groups of species in plots. At the end of 2014 we were thrilled to find that the addition site in particular had worked very well, and had very clearly different communities. From this we were able to show different amounts of carbon gained and lost from the system, and different rates of nutrient cycling across the treatments. The species rich site is slightly trickier, but we are persevering!

Taking Green House Gas Measurements on data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAPABAP///wAAACH5BAEKAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==Species Poor Pasture on Salisbury Plain

We also spent most of June 2014 working at 24 sites around the Plain. These sites were intended to form a gradient from very artificial cropland systems, all the way to pristine species rich chalk grassland. We measured the vegetation, looking at the species communities, and gas fluxes including methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. We also collected soil to look at how fertile it was at each site and to characterise the microbial community. This work is still ongoing, but preliminary results suggest that while species richness increases dramatically as the system becomes more natural, the effects on carbon lock down and nutrient cycling are less simple; broadly, more carbon and nutrients are lost and cycled when grasslands are allowed to lie fallow but have had some fertiliser inputs.

In the summer of 2015 we plan to add a new dimension to the experimental treatments, by including a climate change treatment. This will use IPCC projections for the year 2100 to create a rainfall regime that will add water stress to our grasslands. We will achieve this by adding rain shelters to the plots and changing the amount and pattern of rainfall. We’re starting to build them now, and we’re hoping for a lovely year weather wise like last year!

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